The Greatest Video Game of All Time

With the soon-to-be-blogged-about-by-Thunderbelly Video Games Live tour coming to Chicago, I've been thinking a lot video games- what makes a great video game, how did video games change my life, things like that. I thought about how Super Mario Bros. broadened my horizons, specifically as it regarded eating mushrooms and feeling like I was three times my original size. I though about Little League World Series, which taught me how to live my athletic fantasies out in digital form. I thought about Metroid and how space warriors can be really hot chicks. But one game stands above them all. One game made my world bigger and smaller at the same time, and forever changed the way I'd think about life. That one game was Bill Laimbeer's Combat Basketball.

It's been said that the great works of art are those that reimagine our world, that add to the mythos of their subject by exploring the extremes of it's intricacies, and
Bill Laimbeer's Combat Basketball is a clinic on reimagination. BLCB takes a brave, thurough post-apocalyptic look at the noble game of basketball through the mechanical eyes of half-men, half-robots, one of which is actually legendary Detroit Piston's center, Bill Laimbeer. Many American works have featured this kind of intellectual extrapolation, and one of the more common questions associated has been "What can stop these half-men, half-robots, one of which is actually Bill Laimbeer?". BLCB addresses this question with blunt, brutal honesty- missiles. Lots and lots of missiles. And bombs. And lasers. Lots and lots of lasers. And trap doors. In this way, BLCB is not just a futurist vision of "The Thinking Man's Game", it is a roadmap for dealing with the half-men, half-robots, one of which is Bill Laimbeer which are no longer a question of if, but a question of when.

Even if you can't follow the logic to this future in a literal sense, the metaphor of sports, bio-medical technology, and violence colliding against the backdrop of basketball is a powerful one indeed. Remember, this game was created more than a decade before the Ron Artest brawl in Detroit. Meaningless distraction? Or thought provoking soothsayer. Relying on Bill Laimbeer's violent nature to probe the depths athletes are willing to go to to win gave Combat Basketball a strange kind of unbelievable believability. The game is less a shot-in-the-dark guestimation of an athlete's violent sense of determination, and more of a realistic, if horrifying, definition of basketball according to Bill Laimbeer. Mr. Laimbeer himself contributed many of the concepts used in the game, including the replacement of referees with stationary buzzsaws.

It's been said that a man's vision of the future is the purest reflection of his soul. As such, Combat Basketball goes where few games have gone before. It galiantly suggests that in the course of one man's playing career, basketball will evolve into a bloody, deadly, completely awesome sport that once and for all levels the playing field. In that sense, the game is a dream of complete racial equality, where a man's worth on the basketball court is not measured by the color of his skin, or even the nature of his abilities, but his resitsance to thermal grenades. And in an industry which is mired constantly in exploring violence for violence's sake, is it not refreshing to see a title that uses violence as a workable metaphor?

In the end, Combat Basketball competes well with games in standard benchmarks like graphics, game play and re-playability, but it is the added element of social commentary that elevates it to the level of legendary. When playing Combat Basketball, it is very easy to be distracted by the constant death and dismemberment, but long after you've switched the console off and wrapped the cable around the controller, the images stay with you. The questions are thrust into your psyche. Where are we going as a civilization? Are sports too violent? How can we stop the half-men, half-robots, one of which is actually Bill Laimbeer? The answers may not all be as handy as the shoulder-mounted howlitzer you used to score the winning basket, but with a generation of our best and brightest inspired by this game, we can rest assured they are on their way.